Imagine helping to recreate the language your ancestors spoke. You have to start thinking like them, even if you don’t have all their words, and even if they did not have to name all the things that you work with today. “There must have been a word, for example, for watermelon,” Nitana Hicks of Mashpee told an audience at Tales of Cape Cod in Barnstable Village this week, but that word had been lost as use of the language died out because of the dominance of white settlers. So, said Hicks, who was talking about her part in a reclamation project for the language of the Wampanoag, she thought that “wet-squash” suited the summer fruit. By agreement of others, then, in modern Wampanoag, “wet-squash” it is. Right now, there is a 7-year-old child on Cape Cod who is being raised with the native tongue as her first language. Hicks said 250 families are enrolled in classes that allow everyone of native descent “to get to the level they want.”
As preliminary work, the language project has created a dictionary, some Wampanoag-based word games, coloring and storybooks, and even a three-day “immersion camp” where only the native language is spoken. A major characteristic of the language that Hicks called “complicated” is that it does not distinguish between genders but does separate “animate” and “inanimate.”
Click here to read the full article
No comments:
Post a Comment